Barack Obama's rise to the top of American politics must have taken a lot of people by surprise. Like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama has come out of relative obscurity to take the world by storm. But it is clear that he has had his eyes set for the top job all the while, if his kindergarten essay "I Want To Be President" is anything to go by. Along the way, he, like Clinton, read voraciously, studying at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, two Ivy League institutions in the United States. And when he was called upon to address the National Democratic Convention in 2006, most observers felt at the time that the young senator from Illinois was set for the big stage. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama relates how President George W. Bush drew him aside one day at the Oval Office and told him that he would soon be a target not only for the Republicans, but also for the Democrats. Senator Obama has surmounted the on slaught of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, and he is on the verge of getting the better of his Republican rival for the Oval Office the irrepressible Senator John McCain.
It is his surging progress in the race to the White House that has incurred the wrath of Paul Schlesselman and Daniel Cowart, two alleged neo-Nazis hell-bent on assassinating him. Both young men are apparently racists cast in the mould of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the notorious organisation of white men in the US who commit violent racist crimes. The KKK was dreaded in the 1960s, when it inflicted unspeakable horrors on African Americans, especially those who dared to spearhead the civil rights movement. Obama's ascendancy is a symbolic victory of the civil rights movement over the hate represented by the KKK. This is exactly what Obama meant when he told reporters that "these kinds of hate groups" 'had been marginalised and were not part of America's future".
Senator Obama represents the new America where race is of no account; he represents America's future where character and competence will be the standard for becoming president. In this new future that will be ushered in on November 4, 2008, race will cease to matter in all facets of American life. In this new America, it will dawn on everyone that all of humanity is genetically the same; no race is genetically superior to another.
This is the new global trend, embodied in a dramatic fashion in the person of Senator Barack Obama.
In this new America, the likes of Paul Schlesselman and Daniel Cowart will be made impotent unless they change their ways and come to terms with the emerging reality of the fellowship of humanity.
"Cruelty has a Human Heart And Jealousy a Human Face, Terror the Human Form Divine, And Secrecy the Human Dress".
Blake William
